RAILROADS AXD TRADE-CENTERS. 335 



of these lake-ports saw the increasing prosperity of Chicago, and each 

 and every one of them fell into the very error which Senator Cullom 

 cherishes to-day. In almost his exact language each one said to itself 

 — You people who are rushing to Chicago to build your docks and 

 elevators are poor deluded creatures, who " have no means of knowing 

 what are the natural channels of traffic." Those railroads are fooling 

 you. Don't go to Chicago. Here at Racine, at Kenosha, at Milwau- 

 kee, is the place for your capital. Here is where the great develop- 

 ment is to be. (There was no Interstate Commerce law then, but 

 here was its sj)irit, and its root was, as perhaps a generation later, 

 jealousy pure and simple). But somehow the capital still poured into 

 Chicago ; its docks and elevators multiplied. What was the next 

 step of the jilted towns ? Each went to work ; each for itself built 

 a railroad of its own, mortgaging the propei'ty of its citizens, issuing 

 its bonds, pledging its credit, and multiplying its taxes to pay for it. 

 What was the result ? Simply that the wheat and corn and produce 

 which had come to each of these ports to be loaded into ships— thereby 

 making the trade on which the town lived and fattened in moderate 

 prosperity — now having a cheaper transit to a larger and therefore 

 better market, went where? — went to Chicago! In other words, 

 these cities had destroyed themselves — impoverished not only their 

 citizens, but loaded their successors with debt — not to increase their 

 own prosperity, but that of hated Chicago ! They had tried to fight 

 the inexorable laws of trade and of trade-centers, and had been ruined 

 in the attempt. The West is not free to-day from the effects of this 

 lake-side effort to guide and assist the natural laws of ti'ade. Money 

 is yet being paid annually into New York trust companies in the vi- 

 cinity of Wall Street by these same small lake cities (many of which 

 by the prevailing of better counsels have become manufacturing towns 

 of wealth and importance), as their yet uncompleted penance for be- 

 lieving in their own wisdom as against the unwritten statutes of the 

 universe ; and if Senator Cullom sincerely believes that trade-centers 

 can be created by human foresight, he can — by following up the map 

 in the direction I have indicated — find many students in the hard 

 school of experience willing to enlighten him. 



It has been the bulk of criticism against the Interstate Commerce 

 law, not that it was unconstitutional, but that it was an attempt to 

 equalize by statute what Nature and cosmic forces has rendered un- 

 equal ; that it was Geography and not the railways which had estab- 

 lished sea-ports and lake-ports and river-ports ; and that — since the sea, 

 the lakes, and rivers did not as a rule charge more for a short than for 

 a long haul — it was putting the statute-book of the United States into 

 the position of a bull warning off comets, to give a railroad a franchise 

 to live with one hand, and with the other to brandish a sword over it 

 if — in operating its franchise — it compete with its competitors ! But 

 the bottom objection on the part of the people to the railway com- 



